Christian Cantrell is a science fiction author and Senior Experience Development Manager at Adobe.

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The Epoch Index

Quinn Mitchell is a nine-to-five spy. She’s a data analyst for the CIA during the day, and a suburban wife and mother on evenings and weekends. After a series of personal struggles and professional failures, Quinn hopes to find redemption in her newest assignment: a series of bizarre assassinations where victims are found with three-digit numbers tattooed, burned, or carved into their flesh. As Quinn pursues the killer across the globe — always one body behind — their lives become entangled in ways neither of them can predict.

This novella by Christian Cantrell takes place in a world bordering on unprecedented change: as oil-based economies shift to hydrogen, the majority of wealth is redistributed across the globe; as aging nuclear arsenals are replaced with even more menacing threats, terrorists try to seize opportunities to tip the balance of power; and as humans become increasingly dependent on machines, massive indexes of information accumulate which can reveal almost anything about anyone to those who know how to use them.

The Epoch Index is a story about a world changing faster than humanity can adapt to it — a world which may require us to redefine what it means to be a hero.